Information Technology (IT) configuration managers are often interested in tracking configuration changes in a monitored environment as part of incident/problem management or auditing activities. Such changes may be authorized changes that have been approved (this may be verified by correlating these changes to existing Requests For Change—RFCs, and checking the compliance of the corresponding composite configuration items of the environment) or unauthorized changes.
When monitoring the configuration of an environment of composite configuration items (CIs) of a large organization, numerous CIs are to be considered. Typically, IT managers refer to “snapshots” of the environment, which are historical states of configuration of that environment that are recorded in the course of time.
Snapshot comparison in real time may be very time consuming, especially when considering large environments.